In August Productions

It's real simple. If you aren't a bank or a credit card company, and I'm not logged in to my actual private account information, stop logging me out of my session due to inactivity.

This means you, airplane reservation systems.

This means you, anonymous web shopping carts.

Guess what? Sometimes when I'm shopping online, I'm doing other things. Or I pause to check some stuff out. There is almost never a time when I'm thankful that you, Lenovo, have cleared out my choices so far for my security. I mean, really? Oh - and if I add something to my wish-list - which is the closest thing I can find to "save for later" - how about you save the CONFIGURED version of the item, not the base model which no one would want anyway.

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."

Is anyone out there actually still using 32-bit systems for new deployments? On purpose?
I know I occasionally see people who have 64-bit systems and have installed 32-bit OS on them. They are one of two things: people who don't know what they are doing, or why their server is then having memory problems, or people who have 32-bit Linux installed on their laptops because there is no good 64-bit Flash Player plugin for Linux. (/me shoots Adobe in the Face... it's called re-compile it and release, please)
The 32-bit laptop people I don't care about - they are not yet hosting websites on their laptops while browsing YouTube. Yet.
The others just need the learning.
Which brings me back to... should we start to consider 32-bit a dinosaur sort of like AIX 4.1?
(I should be clear here... I am honestly asking... not just trolling. I'm also not advocating bad code - see previous post.)

I was reading comments on an article at BusinessWeek about Sun and Jonathan Schwartz, when I came across this gem:

Dude, my son's college funds are tied up in your stock. He keeps getting older but the stock is still hanging. I have two years for that stock to rocket.

Aside from anything useful I might have to offer Sun... I would like to poke this guy in the eyeball. Why would you ever tie up the entirety of something as important as your son's college fund in a single stock? That's stupid. As if diversification weren't a well-known concept already, I would have thought that maybe people would have learned from Enron. Perhaps this is a dedicated employee trusting in and investing in the company he works for. The really naive, since a tank in the company (which happens) means not only is your job but also your source of investment in jeopardy. (That's what happened at Enron) Or, maybe it's just a fanboi... not sure.

But please, PLEASE, don't blame Sun or Jonathan Schwartz if your kids can't go to college. I recommend talking to a investment broker or something.

Dude.

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Ok, in case you just showed up going "finally!", I'm sorry to let you down - I haven't yet ported NDB API to erlang.

But I should - and I want to.

Brian was just talking about concurrent program and mentioned erlang. Turns out that when I was starting off working on the NDB/Connectors, Elliot asked me if I'd considered erlang. Always up for learning a new language I did a quick check, but there were no swig bindings, so I put it off until later.

Then later came and I still hadn't written any code, so I found a book online and started reading. I have to say erlang is very cool.

There is no way on earth I can wrap the NDB API in any meaningful way using erlang. However, I might be able to reimplement the wire protocol in erlang and have the resulting thing be way more stable and scalable. Thing is - it really made me thing we should reimplement all of NDB in erlang. It handles several of the tasks done by the NDB system already by itself - and it's not C++ so it doesn't crash and die every three seconds. On the other hand, I don't think it's as fast as C++ yet - so our speed-hungry friends might not want to play.

However... hey Brian - wanna sit down an write a new clustered database engine for MySQL using erlang? Could be fun...

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